The Power of Clean Clothes
The Power of Clean Clothes Unsheltered homeless populations face a perpetual crisis of hygiene. Without access to basic resources (such as clean food/water and clean clothes), one’s health is left particularly vulnerable. One exacerbating factor here is the lack of health & hygiene facilities actually available to the homeless population. In this blog post, I wish to argue that one particularly underutilized hygiene facility is that of the laundry facility. By expanding our infrastructure to include large-scale and affordable laundry facilities, we can help alleviate the sanitation crisis that inherently accompanies severe poverty. Without a reliable way to wash old clothes, individuals in the homeless population are forced to discard many articles of clothing. As such, one upside of upscaling laundry facilities is that of waste management. A 2025 study by the city of Portland discovered that 17% of all waste left in homeless encampments takes the form of clothing: by g...